They’re coming in. And I’m here alone, without my crew to back me up.
I have less than twenty-one hours until the Javelins might possibly return. Twenty-one hours during which I’ll have to hold this place by myself, because I’m not about to let Ravager and his gang strut in here and help themselves to Drosselmeyer’s trove.
That treasure represents my future and my legacy. It’s going to keep my crew loyal and provide Candle with safety and peace during her final days. It’s going to protect me from the real villains of Belgate and give me the life I deserve.
This asshole might have saved himself time by blowing through the outer wall, but it will take him and his crew a while to navigate the red lightning, and after that he’ll have to deal with the lava moat. Which gives me time to prepare.
The inner keep of Annordun isn’t just the scene of a heist anymore—it’s my home for the next twenty-one hours. I have to defend it.
Most of the items we scored from the Fae-Hunters were traps designed to catch Faeries, but I’m betting some of them can be used on humans, too. And there’s a wealth of dangerous objects in this place. While I may not understand how they all work, I’m sure I can find a way to use some of them.
The masked bastard wants to take my treasure, but I’ll be damned if I let him. At the very least, I can make it so difficult and so excruciatingly painful that he’ll wish he’d never tried it.
I approach the globe again and focus the image on Ravager’s face, on that cocky grin with the prominent eye-tooth. Even though he can’t see me, I hope he can hear the smile in my voice as I say, “Bring it on, motherfucker.”
5
She’s here. The woman with the most beautiful, plush lips I’ve ever seen, the one who caught me in her lair and chased me through the city. It was cold that night, yet she ran after me without pausing to put on a coat or a pair of boots.
My brain conjures an image of the way she looked, standing on the edge of the building, yelling at me across the alley, seething with fury because I dared to break into her precious hideout. She was in her sock feet, barely dressed, her little tits pointed against the flimsy material of her shirt. She keeps her black hair around chin-length, which is a practical choice for a thief, but there are scarlet streaks throughout it. She likes a bit of notoriety. She wants to be recognized by the right people.
My fingers flex, recalling the way her throat felt in my hand. I wore gloves that night, but I swear I could sense her soft skin right through the leather. I liked the way our bodies lined up when we were crushed close together on that rooftop. She’s taller than most women I’ve met, more comparable to my height, so I don’t feel like a bear towering over a puppy when I’m fighting her.
It’s terrible luck that she came to Annordun at all, and especially annoying that she got here before us, yet I can’t stop grinning, not even when Grisly bumps my elbow and snarls, “What was all that about, Rav?”
“Looks like we have a little competition, boys,” I tell him.
“Another gang?” asks Needle.
“The Javelins,” replies Slaughter in his thick Vexxan accent. “You called her Devilry, yes? She leads the Javelins.”
“That’s right.” I touch one of the knives at my belt… her knife. A cute little thing with a gold-plated hilt and a guard to protect her fingers. I prefer daggers with a guard, too. I need my fingers whole and undamaged for picking locks and pockets.
“A woman?” Slaughter laughs. “If they’re led by a woman, they can’t be much competition.”
“Clearly you haven’t known many women,” I say. “They like to keep their distance from you, don’t they? Perhaps because of the smell.”
Grisly and Needle guffaw, and Slaughter glowers. I’m fairly sure he’ll try to murder me once this job is done. An invigorating prospect.
“All in good fun,” I tell him. “Let’s go.”
We move forward into the gap we made in the outer wall. We should be able to simply walk across the ground to the inner wall, blow a hole in it, and continue on to the keep. But as Grisly steps through the hole, red lightning spears straight toward him. I yank him aside just in time.
“The fuck,” he chokes out, rattled.
I poke my head through the opening to gauge the danger. The inner side of the wall we blasted is full of goddamned magical eyes, too, and so is the second wall, some distance away. The gap between the two walls is an ever-changing network of crimson lightning that stabs and snakes up and down, back and forth, covering every part of both walls, reaching from the ground all the way to the faraway parapet.
A betting man might take his chances running that gauntlet of lightning, hoping not to get struck. But I only place bets when I have decent odds, and I don’t like these.
“This isn’t going to be simple. But we didn’t really expect simple, did we?” I tell them. “There’s no glory in easy. We’ll figure this out. Needle, you have the interceptors?”
“Yes, but they’ll burn out quick under all that power.” He nods at the intermittent lightning. “And then we won’t have any anti-spell devices left for the keep itself.”
“Can’t be helped.” I shrug. “We need them now. Get them ready.”
Needle’s specialty is procuring rare relics. He has deep connections to parts of the criminal underworld I never want to see, people so vile that the Consortium gangs won’t touch them. It’s how he found theRathad Acrach, the Hungry Road.
The Rathad is a bezoar from an extremely rare Unseelie beast, extracted from the creature’s stomach and then drenched in the darkest kind of Unseelie magic. For the cost of a life, it opens an undetectable door into Faerie.
